Jury Alumni

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  Angela Bains

  Acting Associate Dean, OCAD University

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Angela Bains currently serves as the Acting Associate Dean within the Faculty of Design at the OCAD University (OCAD U), Toronto, Canada. Her previous role involved serving as the Graduate Program Director for the Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) program. Notably, a member of the Solid Black Collective research group at OCAD U. She is the co-creator of the SFI’s Decolonising Futures BIPOC Speakers Series, and Black SFI (Strategic Foresight & Innovation). In addition to her academic roles, Angela holds the position of Co-Founder and Strategic Director at TransformExp, an esteemed commercial and social change strategy and design firm located in Vancouver, Canada.
  
  Originating from the United Kingdom, Angela brings with her more than three decades of extensive experience in the creative industry. Her professional achievements extend to being a sought-after speaker and host, notably participating in events such as The State of Black Design, Design Management Institute - Diversity in Design Conference, Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) – International DesignThinkers Conference and Black Design, Past, Present & Future. Furthermore, Angela has dedicated her expertise to part-time teaching in Strategic Design at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). This multifaceted professional background underscores Angela Bains' substantial contributions to the fields of design, strategic foresight, and innovation.

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  Phil Balagtas

  Experience Design Director, The Design Futures Initiative, McKinsey Design

  2019 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Phil has been a practicing visual & interaction designer since 2001 and has experience designing across a variety of devices and platforms within non-profit, retail, advertising, and enterprise software organizations. He is currently an Experience Design Director at McKinsey & Company working with a variety of industries to transform and enhance their digital businesses and strategies. He is also the founder and organizer of the Design Futures Initiative which organizes the international Speculative Futures meetups and the PRIMER conference in the US and Europe. An educator and futurist, his events bring together designers and futurists from all over the world to teach and share strategies for designing for the future and the ethical challenges around emerging technologies.

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  Gem Barton

  Ms, Experimental Realism / Office for Speculative Spatial Design

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Gem is an author and senior academic specialising in the interrelations between human behaviour, speculation, and spatial design. Currently teaching at the Royal College of Art, she was awarded a coveted National Teaching Fellowship in 2019, is Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, and founding chair of QuEAN - Queer Educators in Architecture Network. Gem’s work in the future(s) space comes to life through her advisory, research, teaching and leadership of superFUTURES at the RCA, her directorship of the Experimental Realism platform and consultation services offered through her Office for Speculative Spatial Design (O-SSD).

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  Kevin Bethune

  Founder and Chief Creative Officer, dreams • design + life

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a "think tank" that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 25+ year career, positioning him to help brands deliver meaningful innovations to enrich people's lives.
  
  His work represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture, and a deep industrial design approach to inform and influence desirable, feasible and business-viable design outcomes.
  
  Kevin began his career as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power industry. This chapter gave him deep product experience working with high performing teams across 14 nuclear reactor upgrade campaigns. After his MBA, Kevin joined Nike, Inc. in a business capacity, but quickly navigated to the Global Footwear product engine to drive advanced digital product creation capabilities, discovering the world of design in the process. After solidifying his creative foundation through further studies at ArtCenter College of Design, Kevin co-founded distinct design & innovation capabilities at two Tier 1 management consulting firms in Booz & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). As Vice President of Strategic Design at BCG Digital Ventures, he led a large cohort of designers that would influence and shape every corporate venture spun out from the incubator. Kevin left BCG Digital Ventures to carve his own path under the banner of dreams • design + life, focusing on unlocking human potential through strategic design, industrial design and the building of new ecologies.
  
  Kevin also serves as a Board Trustee for ArtCenter College of Design and a Board Director for the Design Management Institute (DMI).

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  Alisha Bhagat

  Futures Lead, Forum for the Future

  2022 Speculative Design Jury Captain

  Alisha Bhagat is a futurist and strategist whose work focuses on the creative use of futures tools such as strategic foresight and scenarios planning to impact long term positive change, particularly around social justice. She is based at Forum for the Future, a non-profit, and is a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design. Alisha is passionate about changing the narrative around who the future is for - and convenes the Diaspora Futures Collective, a group of POC working on decolonizing, reframing, and taking action for the future. When she isn't thinking about the future, Alisha is an avid gamer and science fiction nerd. She holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University.

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  Monika Bielskyte

  Futures Researcher/Futurist Designer, PROTOPIA

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Captain

  As the Founder of Protopia Futures, Monika Bielskyte is the architect of a platform and a community to proactively prototype inspiring and actually livable future visions. Her journey as a nomadic explorer in over 100 countries has given her first-person experience of the interconnectedness between human cultural priorities and the unfolding future.
  
  Monika was born in the Soviet Union, and grew up in the newly liberated Lithuania, before leaving the country at age 17. Her perspectives as a futurist have been shaped by the collapse of the physical boundaries of a totalitarian regime, and the opening up of the digital world – its opportunities and its harms. She currently resides in Johannesburg, South Africa – which gives her deeper insights into broader futures perspectives, beyond the imaginations of the Global North.
  
  Monika started her career as a creative – working on movie sets in her late teens and progressively moving towards the bleeding edge of technological innovation and scientific research by her mid-20s. Her multicultural and multidisciplinary background, as well as an uncompromising focus on the intricate relationship between future fictions and real-life, have guided her on a journey that makes her voice clearly distinct in today’s foresight industry.
  
  Monika has worked not only with established global media, tech and lifestyle companies such as Universal, Google, Nike, BBC and the WEF, but also various governments and cities. Her contributions have resonated across both industry corridors and academia, from The Royal
  Society to CERN.

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  Robert Bolton

  Principal, From Later

  2020 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Robert Bolton is a Canadian artist, strategist, and principal at the foresight studio, From Later. Recognizing art works and practices as powerful antennae for detecting change, Robert experiments with ways of understanding and imagining how emerging ideas, technologies and cultural phenomena may influence longer-term futures. As an advisor to decision-makers within all matter of organizations, Robert leads interdisciplinary teams, developing strategies for long-term growth and resilience. Robert was a National Science Foundation AoSL Innovation Fellow and holds a Masters of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. His essays on the future of DIY biotech have been published by MIT Press’s Innovations Journal and the Eindhoven University of Technology’s Next Nature Lab. In 2019, Robert instructed a course on strategic foresight at CityLAB: Berlin — a satellite campus of Norwich University.

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  Dr. Deepa Butoliya

  Assistant Professor, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan

  2021 Speculative Design Jury Captain

  Dr. Butoliya is a researcher and design educator based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her research is located at the intersection of models of knowledge and critical thinking emerging from multiple and global perspectives. She researches critique in design from pluriversal perspectives- especially grassroots critical practices in design. She has a background in design and architecture with a career spanning 15 years in multiple roles as an industrial designer, researcher, and educator across two continents. She wants to help create a sustainable, equitable, and inclusive environment for societies with local awareness and a global vision.

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  Ti Chang

  Co-founder & VP of Design, Crave

  2021 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Ti Chang is a design activist-entrepreneur and activist bridging modern design and activism. She is co-founder and VP of Design of CRAVE, a San Francisco-based company specializing in aesthetic pleasure products. Ti leads the design vision for the company’s full line of products which has won international design awards and has led CRAVE to mainstream partnerships with the likes of Nordstrom, MoMA Design Store, Goop, and Saint Laurent. 
  
  Ti is best known for her design of the Vesper vibrator necklace in 2014, an iconic necklace that symbolizes female empowerment and creating conversations to normalize pleasure. 
  
  Ti holds an M.A. in Design Products from the Royal College of Art in London and a B.S. in Industrial Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2021, Ti co-founded Design Allyship (designallyship.com) to provide anyone with actionable resources to improve the condition of historically marginalized designers in the industrial & product design industry. 
  

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  Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

  PI and Lead, CoFutures, University of Oslo

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay leads the international research group CoFUTURES, and is the principal investigator of “CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents” (European Research Council), and “Science Fictionality” (Norwegian Research Council) which explore contemporary global futurisms movements. He is manager and co-founder of Theory from the Margins, a research collective with over 16,000 followers worldwide. Chattopadhyay is an Associate Professor of Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. He has served as an innovations consultant with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine and the Evoke Lab/Calit2, as well as the Department of English, University of Liverpool. Chattopadhyay has written or edited ten books, published numerous articles, exhibited in six transnational art projects, and produced the award-winning lm Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey, the rst documentary on science ction from India and Bengal. Other than his research and artistic research grants, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious World Fantasy Award (2020), the Johannes H Berg Memorial Prize (2019), the Foundation Essay Prize (2017), and the Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll Award (2013).

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  Malina Dabrowska

  Foresight Design lead, Arup

  2024 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Malina is a multidisciplinary Design Lead in Arup’s Foresight team. They design experiences and strategies that reimagine our relationship with the built environment.

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  Brian David Johnson

  Professor of Practice, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University

  2022 Speculative Design Jury Member

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  Laura Forlano

  Associate Professor of Design & Director of Critical Futures Lab, Illinois Institute of Design

  2021 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. Over the past ten years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices and the future of work; and, computational fashion, smart textiles and wearable medical technologies. She is an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

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  Holly Friend

  Deputy Foresight Editor, The Future Laboratory

  2022 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Holly Friend is a trend forecaster and futurist obsessed with consumer behaviour. As The Future Laboratory’s deputy foresight editor and in-house Generation Z expert, her work shapes the trends intelligence platform LS:N Global, including micro and macro trend reports, renowned Trend Briefing events and Futures Forums. As well as being quoted by The Guardian, The Times and Dazed, Holly also consults on projects for some of the world’s leading brands and presents insight-packed keynotes at industry events around the world.

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  Jeremy Glenn

  Foresight Analyst, From Later

  2020 Speculative Design Jury Member